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Comment Re:Stretching the laws for corporations (Score 2) 161

Whoa, easy on the vitriol there, bub. Don't let bad design cloud your judgment of the actual case. It matters not how badly the AT&T folks implemented security (or not) on their system. The fact is Weev "stole" it (copied without permission) and then stupidly publicized it. What's more, he "shared it with various interested parties."

If AT&T had left printouts of highly personal data in a dumpster and someone had found it right there, then I don't think you would've had a problem fingering the culprit. AT&T, right? Dumpster diving would certainly not get someone 41 months in the slammer (e.g California v Greenwood).

In other words, it was right there in the open. Hence, the blame lies squarely with AT&T for not properly securing their customers' private information.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone calling their group Goatse Security needs to be punished anyway. I'm not interested in trying to explain to my 6yo what the fuck that means.

Your obvious lack of parenting skills is not his responsibility.

Comment Re:Say what? (Score 1) 226

The entire point of a HAL is that you just plug in your drivers.

The entire point of the HAL is to abstract hardware, any hardware, away from the OS. There's nothing that says it can't encompass more of the hardware than just the IO bus, CPU and MMU, like WinNT does. On an embedded device there's very little in terms of a standard IO bus that the OS can communicate through cleanly with peripherals, so might as well abstract the whole lot.

Comment Re:The situation is much more complicated than tha (Score 1) 364

The unethical part, as far as I understand, is that smaller ISPs rent the "last mile" piece from Bell, which they're allowed to since the infrastructure is wholly, or partially, tax-payer funded. However, they don't buy big-pipe bandwidth from Bell, but instead peer with someone like Cogent. The cost of the bandwidth over the last mile is zero, since additional bytes don't degrade the infrastructure and therefore don't add to maintenance costs. However Bell wants to charge the ISP, for this zero-cost bandwidth, at the same scale as they charge their end-users, who, unlike the ISPs, *are* using their peering connection to talk to the rest of the internet.

The Courts

Submission + - Teacher faces 40 years for porn pop-ups.

a_nonamiss writes: "A 40-year old Connecticut teacher was found guilty of four felony counts of risk of injury to a minor, which carries a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison, because the computer she was using in class displyed pornographic images while she was displaying it to the class. The teacher, Julie Amero, claimed that the popups were appearing on their own, and she could not control them.

From the article:
Computer expert W. Herbert Horner, testifying in Amero's defense, said he found spyware on the computer and an innocent hair styling Web site "that led to this pornographic loop that was out of control."
It's tough for me to believe that they could find twelve people in Connecticut that haven't been stuck in their own involuntary porn loop. Admittedly, I wasn't in the clasroom, and I don't know the exact details of this particular case, but as someone who regularly uses a computer in front of students this prospect scares the hell out of me, to the point that I am rethinking even using a computer in front of students again."

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